Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still the east end. A gr...eat field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore,--olit, olit, olit,--chip, chip, chip, che char,--che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too is helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but more regular! It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. But the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it reaches the living surface beyond. It is glorious to behold this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it, and of the sands on its shore,--a silvery sheen as from the scales of a leuciscus, as it were all one active fish. Such is the contrast between winter and spring. Walden is dead and is alive again. But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water..., made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Grown onto every inch of plate, exceptWhere the hinges let it move, were living things,...Barnacles, mussels, water weeds--and oneBlue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:The origins of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »